


The Winter Soldier VS Bazooka Joe

by razboinicul_iernii



Series: I'm Not Your Friend, Pal [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Anxiety, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, But totally not Bucky's bro, Dogs, Gen, Humor, POV Bucky Barnes, Repairs, Spoilers for the movie Gravity, Tony Stark Has Daddy Issues, Tony Stark Is a Good Bro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 11:04:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7358647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/razboinicul_iernii/pseuds/razboinicul_iernii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He was an expert sniper. A master in hand to hand combat. Unbeatable with the knife. A perfect soldier, a living weapon. Intense and brutal and relentless on the battlefield. And right now...</p><p>Right now he had gum in his arm."</p><p>Bucky has an accident with his arm and turns to the only person on site who can help him, but also has the best reasons to not want to help him at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Winter Soldier VS Bazooka Joe

**Author's Note:**

> Just to verify...back in my day, when you paired people with an '&' or a '+' sign, it meant light relationship stuff and the '/' was reserved for more serious heavy petting stories. But now it seems like '&' means more like friendship instead of romance? Is this true? Because that's what I'm taking it to mean on the tags for this story.
> 
> There is a line here near the end about Bucky's relationship with his own father. While I know they don't explore his family at all in the films, I took this dynamic from the comic "The Life Story of Bucky Barnes". 
> 
> Also one minor warning for Bucky describing something sort of gory with the loss of his flesh arm in a bit of detail. It's in the paragraph that starts with "Bucky tried to keep his eyes from being so wide..."

He was an expert sniper. A master in hand to hand combat. Unbeatable with the knife. A perfect soldier, a living weapon. Intense and brutal and relentless on the battlefield. And right now...

Right now he had gum in his arm.

Sam would never let him live it down. Natasha would make jokes too, which meant Clint would find out and make even more jokes. But Steve. What would Steve think of that kind of inattentive behavior? He was supposed to be able to take care of himself, right? He didn't need _maintenance_ or _handlers_ or any of the other HYDRA words that used to dictate his entire existence. Even if they'd been familiar and comfortable compared to the unknown. Or was that just a response they'd ingrained in him, to be so afraid of a life without them?

He didn't want to think about it. Didn't want to think about the gum tangled in wires and drying on to circuits and metal plating either but he had no choice. The other thing he had no choice about was that he absolutely had to tell the person he least wanted to. He was fine with not having choices. But he wasn't fine with having to tell Tony Stark, who probably hated him more than anyone on the planet. This arm was the only thing Tony _liked_ about him, and even that was more of an inevitable, professional interest than a genuine pleasure.

But who was he? He was strong, right? He pushed himself through situations most people would deem 'worse' than this one. How screwed up was he that he'd rather be trading gunfire with insurgents than standing outside the door to Tony's lab? Okay, so maybe there were some things he'd definitely hate more than this. Opening that door and seeing Pierce on the other side might reduce him to a frantic, gibbering mess because even as much as he'd fight every other element of HYDRA, Pierce was too much. Pierce had a hold that reached right down to the reptilian parts of his brain, and it _sucked._ He was glad the guy was dead but then also _terrified_ that he was dead because Pierce was supposed to be _everything_ and how could he exist when all of the structure was suddenly ripped out of the universe?

So he guessed it could be worse than Tony.

He sucked it up and knocked. He knew it might be several minutes before Tony opened it. People told him that's just how Tony was sometimes. That once his mind was on a track he'd block out everything else in order to avoid derailing his thoughts. And that was fine. He didn't have anywhere better to be but mostly because if he went anywhere else people would notice the gum. But he also knew he was the intrusion here. He had no right to get impatient. And he was pretty sure he'd been made to wait a lot longer than a few minutes for much more painful problems with his arm or his body so he didn't mind that part. Beyond all that, it sounded like Tony was speaking to someone in the room, though he never heard a response so he couldn't be sure who it was. That might mean a longer wait. He looked down at his feet, then at the dog beside him who was like a second shadow, then down the hall in both directions to be sure no one else was around.

The wait was only about three minutes long. Tony opened the door and his eyes went right to the arm, like he knew there was no other reason Bucky would come down here. "Really? Friday, make a note. Barnes is not allowed to have any more Big League Chew until he learns how to eat it like a big boy."

"It was an accident," Bucky said but he tried not to sound too defensive for fear of losing his only help in this situation.

"Right. I accidentally get gum tangled up in my crevices all the time," Tony said, but he moved out of the doorway and walked off without explicitly waving him in. Bucky figured him not closing the door _was_ the invitation and took it. There was something on the table but Bucky couldn't make heads or tails of it. He knew the pieces-wires and circuit boards and silicon chips and processors-but not what it was all culminating towards. On the ground by Tony's stool, the other dog, Tony Bark, sat chewing on a toy. He thumped his tail against the floor when he and Quiet came in, and Bucky gave the dog a pat on the head. He noticed that there was no one else in the room and no video chat screens open and he smirked but said nothing about Tony's conversation partner. "Explain," Tony said and the word stabbed right into the center of Bucky's brain like an order, even if he knew it wasn't.

"I fell asleep. With gum in my mouth." Bucky shook his head and the longer he spoke the more tense he felt. His left arm interpreted the tension as it usually did, and the plates kind of squeezed tighter. He winced when he heard a squishy noise near his wrist. "And when I woke up, it'd come out and was stuck in here." He pointed to his wrist where the gum had initially lodged itself and skipped over why he'd woken up in the middle of the night. He didn't think Tony would care much about his bad dreams and he was bothering the guy enough already.

"You couldn't have just choked on it like a normal person?" Tony asked, but his eyes were on the arm like he was already dissecting it mentally.

"We both know you aren't that lucky," Bucky said. Natasha was trying to help him with stuff like that, sarcasm and humor and jokes and banter. She said he'd need it if he was going to be working with them. "I tried to get it out myself but it just...stretched. So I tried from the other angle and ended up just pushing it in further and it got caught on something in there and...now I'm here. With gum. In my insides."

"I'd ask you if anything is permanently damaged but asking _you_ a question like that is like asking if the sky is blue today," Tony said, not looking at him while he moved things around on one of the tables. Bucky didn't argue or get offended or huff a breath, all things Steve would've done if he'd just heard Tony say that. He was screwed up, scarred, whatever you wanted to call it and he wasn't going to deny it. He didn't care if someone else joked about it because it didn't change anything. Plus Tony joked about everything and everyone, so who was he to feel like some special exception to that? "Sit," came Tony's voice and Bucky felt his eyes go out of focus for a minute and this wasn't an order, not an order, not _that_ chair. "Or stand, I don't care, just get over here."

Bucky shook his head like he could clear out the anxiety-that's what that empty feeling in his stomach was, he'd learned-and he shuffled closer to Tony and his table.

"Friday, give me anything you've got on his arm. Schematics, manuals, whatever the OctoNazis left us." Tony still wasn't looking at him, grabbing a few tools and Bucky wanted to laugh. Seventy years of watching people work on his arm and he still had no idea what any of the things they use on it are called. And why would they want him to know how to fix it himself? It was another leash. If it broke, his only option would be to go back to them or suffer through increasingly serious malfunctions.

"Got it, boss. I'm already detecting an issue in the hydraulics here-" There was a flashing blue light on his wrist and it expanded, turning into some kind of holographic rendering of the inside of the arm. "Estimating a break down in the mechanisms controlling the fingers in another two minutes."

"Maybe that's what that noise was," Bucky muttered under his breath.

"Great. This is what I wanted to do with my afternoon."

Bucky stared for a minute because people tended to stare at him when he lost track of time. It'd been hard when he'd first gotten free. He had no idea how days felt because he wasn't used to experiencing them in their entirety. And everything became senseless when his routine had been taken from him. "It's nearly midnight," he said and almost felt like he shouldn't. He wasn't usually the one correcting people so it seemed wrong.

Tony blinked and just said, "Oh." Then he shrugged like it was inconsequential what time it was. He looked at Bucky. "Well? Are we sitting or standing through this? I can't tell you how long I expect this to take until I get a look under the hood."

Bucky eyed the chair Tony had pulled up beside the table. There were two. The stool Tony had been on, and the one that he guessed was supposed to be more comfortable given that it had a back and arms. But it didn't make him feel at ease. Standing up for a little while wouldn't kill him.

"Friday what's the word for someone with a phobia of chairs?"

"There doesn't seem to be one, though a few pages have suggested calling it _seatophobia._ "

Tony sputtered. "That's a dumb name." Then he raised his eyebrows and shrugged. "But it's a dumb phobia. So I guess it fits."

"Phobias tend to be irrational, boss. Sergeant Barnes' fears are rooted in trauma and seem more likely to fall under the umbrella of post-traumatic stress disorder." He couldn't decide what was weirder, Tony calling him out on his stupid and childish fear of sitting in a god damn _chair_ , or an AI defending him over it. He forced himself to sit down so they'd maybe stop talking about it. He let his arm drop to the table with a thud that rattled some of the tools. It also seemed to piss his poor, gum-ridden arm off to its breaking point because there was some angry, whirring kind of noise and some of his fingers twitched sporadically.

"You broke it. It's done. Toss it out and we'll get you a broom handle since you can't be trusted with advanced robotics," Tony said, throwing up his hands. Quiet flinched at Bucky's feet. He wasn't supposed to reassure her because she could interpret the reassurance as meaning she had a good reason to be afraid of something. It felt wrong.

"Is it really broken?"

"I haven't even looked at it yet, how would I know?"

Bucky took a breath in through his nose, like if he filled himself up with air that empty anxious feeling would have no choice but to go away. But it didn't happen. He bounced his leg. It didn't help. Tony picked up one of the tools and Bucky tried not to look at it but the lab was just full of equipment and utensils and devices so it didn't matter where he settled his eyes. It was stupid that after all this time he'd still get nervous. He knew Tony wouldn't purposefully damage him-even if he didn't like Bucky, he wouldn't want to piss off Steve. But still the thoughts came, that he'd shock him, find a way to make him docile, blame him for something, some failing, and then what would they do with him?

There was a noise like a gear grinding and he actually jumped and drew his arm back to himself. Tony shoved himself back too, like he was expecting a violent reaction. Tony Bark, on the other hand, thought a great game was going on and jumped up, wagging his tail and barking for a moment. Tony raised his hands, a tool in each one, never letting Bucky out of his sight. "Just trying to do what you came here and asked me to."

Bucky tried to keep his eyes from being so wide, and he nodded before forcing his arm back down to the table. The fore and middle finger tapped erratically without any input from him. He couldn't clench his fist. His right hand shook a little too, so all around he felt out of control of himself and he hated it. Tony focused on his arm again, a grimace on his face as he pulled away the plating and a string of pink gum came with it. Bucky looked away because suddenly it wasn't gum, it was veins and arteries trailing out of him, blood gushing into otherwise pure white snow with each frantic beat of his heart. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to tell himself to stop being so stupid. He was here, in a lab that was as different from any of HYDRA's as could be-for God's sake there was a kitten 'hang-in-there' poster on one of the walls-with Tony Stark, someone who hated HYDRA.

"Friday, can we get a movie going? I'm going to need something to keep me sane between bouts with the jungle of gum and wires here," Tony said suddenly. Bucky wasn't sure how Tony was going to work on both his arm and watch a film at the same time, but if anyone could multitask, it was Stark.

"What would you like, boss?" Friday asked.

"Mmm, something science fiction. Seems thematically appropriate while wrist deep in a robot arm."

The screen on the other side of the table, one that Bucky imagined was more often used for displaying schematics or something similar, lit up. He glanced at it. Something made a grinding noise in his arm again and Bucky fought hard against the urge to jump. The plates in his arm still tensed, though, all the way up to his shoulder. He missed whatever the opening screen of the film said, and when he looked up, it was showing a view of Earth from space.

"Good choice, Friday," Tony said. He wiped something on a rag. It was gum. Only a little bit at a time. Bucky tried to keep from expressing any displeasure at that. Tony had zero obligation to help him. Less than zero. If anything, Bucky _owed_ him. A lot. Tony nodded towards the screen but his eyes were still on Bucky's wrist. Bucky could hear him scraping at something again and it made his teeth itch. "Modern masterpiece. You know the effects were so good someone asked the director how they were able to film in space?"

Bucky directed his attention back to the screen and part of him knew it was all done with computers. But another part of him could hardly believe that image on the screen was fake. He watched while a pair of astronauts made repairs to some satellite and well, he knew how the satellite felt. _"Houston, I have a bad feeling about this mission..."_ the male astronaut said in a conversational tone. Bucky kept watching, absorbed in that amazing rendering of Earth. If he'd seen this seventy years ago he would've crapped himself. Maybe he'd never get that kind of view first-hand, even in his absurdly long lifetime, but he was just thrilled enough to be able to see these kinds of things at all. Even if the movie wasn't real, there were plenty of actual pictures from space to look at.

Then the tranquil scene changed, some debris was ripping through the spaceship and he could hardly tear his eyes away when one of the characters was sent hurtling into space. He was pretty sure the director of the movie didn't intend for the audience to think 'there are worse ways to die', but it's what Bucky thought. At least with a death like that you had something amazing to look at while you went under. Got to be in space, something barely anyone gets. And then you'd be out there forever, pretty much. Another satellite. Maybe get snagged in something's orbit and be the most fucked-up moon ever.

A sudden whirring from his arm brought his attention back to Tony. All of his fingers were twitching now and Tony was grimacing, so that couldn't be a good sign. Slowly the anxiety crept up on him again and he clenched his right hand into a fist. The pile of gum was a little bigger now. "What is it?" Bucky asked.

"A bunch of technical jargon you'd never understand," Tony answered. His eyes flicked back to the screen even as he teased some wire out of the hand. "Oh, this part's great. It's right before-"

"Hey, wait, I haven't seen it," Bucky said quickly before Tony could finish. 'Spoilers' were a big thing now. Back in the day he didn't mind people telling him what had happened in a movie because there was a good chance he'd never be able to afford to see it himself. But now, it was just a common courtesy to not spoil movies and other media for people because it wasn't so rare for them to get to see it, and the internet made it easier than ever to spread information.   
  
He fixed his eyes to the screen where the pair of remaining astronauts were struggling to get to a space station. The movie was pretty intense, even with the interruptions from his arm doing stupid things like making angry grinding noises or randomly jerking away from Tony's grasp when he put the wrong pair of wires back together. He'd get caught up in the reminder that this was a lab and someone was working on him like the machine he was, but then Tony would always point him back to the movie because a really good scene was coming up and Tony didn't want to miss it. Bucky would watch, too. It kept his mind off the arm and the anxiety of it being repaired.

The astronaut had finally contacted someone with the radio, and just when he thought she'd found help, it turned out to be someone on Earth who couldn't even understand her. _"I know, we're all gonna die. Everybody knows that. But I'm gonna die_ today. _Funny that, to know...But the thing is, I'm still scared. Really scared."_ His stomach twisted in knots and he barely noticed Tony leaning an elbow against the tabletop, eyes also glued to the screen. " _Nobody will mourn for me. Nobody will pray for my soul. Will you mourn for me? Will you say a prayer for me? Or is it too late?"_ Bucky thought he'd never seen something in a movie that felt so authentically hopeless in his life. Sure maybe he'd seen fewer movies than your average person, and a lot of films put people up against impossible odds. But you always knew they were going to win so it didn't really feel all that dire. Watching the astronaut's quiet kind of acceptance of her fate was somehow devastating. He wanted to do something. How could a _movie_ make him feel so helpless?

Tony tore his eyes away just as the astronaut started to turn down the air in her capsule, resigning herself to death. The screen froze and Bucky actually flinched. "You're all set," Tony said, nodding at the pile of pink gum and the few small sections of clipped wires and one broken part that had been replaced.

Bucky almost did a double-take because he'd forgotten altogether that his arm was being worked on. And that was good. He was glad it was over with. But he let his eyes flick up back to the screen. "Well...wait, what happens? She can't give up there," he said, gesturing with his now fully functioning and gum-free arm. Then he realized how imposing he was being, how much of Tony's time he'd already taken up, and he shrugged as he stood. "What's it called again?" He was sure Friday could help him figure out how to play it in his room.

Tony drummed his fingers against the table and looked back at the screen like he was gathering his thoughts. Maybe he wouldn't tell Bucky. Either out of contempt for having his evening interrupted or maybe the movie really did end with the astronaut dying. How else could it go? She was completely alone in an inescapable situation and no one even knew she was out there in need of help. His night was not ending on a high note if that was the case. But then Tony said, "It's called sit down and watch." So Bucky did just that and it didn't feel or sound like an order because it was something he wanted to do anyway. And maybe, he thought, Tony wanted to, too.

He didn't remember falling asleep at the bench and he imagined Tony didn't either. They'd talked about the movie-sometimes arguing, but not too heatedly-and he guessed neither of them noticed longer pauses between responses until they just couldn't keep their eyes open anymore. Tony said he liked it. Bucky thought it was one of the greatest things he'd ever seen and Tony had accused him of just being an old fogey blindsided by the special effects. That forced Bucky to articulate why he liked it. The astronaut wasn't a very strong person at first. She had to go through a lot, had to let go of the past, had to look death right in the face and learn how to move on. Only then could she fight her way to survival, basically on her own, when all possible odds were stacked against her. And she made it home a stronger person after it was all said and done. Tony didn't look at him, but he nodded slowly and finally said he _guessed_ he could appreciate a story like that, too.

When Bucky woke up, he asked Friday for the time. "Seven twenty-six, sir," she responded and her upbeat voice brought Tony back to life, too. He groaned loudly and worked out his arm. Then his eyes flicked to Bucky and he frowned.

"What're you doing in here?"

"Fell asleep."

Tony rubbed his eyes. "Great. Now I'm having sleepovers with super soldiers. _What_ am I doing with my life," he muttered, getting to his feet. Tony Bark jumped up without a second thought, tongue lolling out as he glued his perky brown eyes to his de facto master. "At least you won't judge me," Tony said to the dog.

That brought Bucky's attention back to the gob of gum in the middle of the table and he pressed his lips together. "Hey. Thanks for your help. But-" He stopped, trying to figure out how to best ask yet another favor of someone who shouldn't ever even want to look at him.

"Four hours of sleep, no caffeine, waking up to _you_ as my uh, table-mate, you've got to just come out with it, man," Tony said, sounding as every ounce of tired as he looked.

"Don't tell Steve. About the gum." He felt that stupid heat on his ears that meant embarrassment and he used to only feel it when he'd malfunctioned and missed a target the first go around. Now he felt it all the time and it pissed him off but that was never enough to make him figure out how to stop from feeling it. "It'd be-I mean, you know. I don't want to-"

"Ugh, you're dumber than you look if you think he'd ever manage to actually be upset with you," Tony muttered, eyes on his phone that was already undoubtedly saddled with hundreds of notifications given that it'd been a whole four hours since he touched it. There were a lot of things Bucky wanted. He was relieved that Tony's level of importance was not one of them.

"This was a pretty stupid thing for me to let happen," Bucky said. "Careless. I mean, what would we have done if you weren't around? How could I tell him the reason I can't ever use my left arm again is because I got _gum_ in it?"

"You can keep going with the Tony worship, but have to stop with the self-flagellation. Harshes my buzz."

Bucky pushed himself off of the chair and stood up straight. Sleeping at a table was not comfortable but he'd slept in worse places. "You really don't think he'd be disappointed?" Maybe he was being too dramatic, too wound up about a mistake. He was supposed to be okay with making mistakes now, was supposed to know there wasn't a punishment waiting for him. It was hard to shake off the idea that you're supposed to be flawless and poised and ready to act at all times. But there was no worse thing in the world he could be than a disappointment to Steve so it ate at him either way.

Tony made an inarticulate, sputtering noise and rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I don't think that's a burden _you'll_ ever have to bear, his 'disappointment'." Air quotes came up around the word, giving Bucky the distinct impression that Tony was somehow stung by...something. He couldn't quite decide what.

"Maybe. It's-" He felt his eyes narrow and brows tug together in the way they did when he was remembering something from far away. One of those memories he had to dig at because it was so old and distant but it was there if he focused. "I remember my...dad. The last thing-" He twisted his lips as he remembered something a lot more pressing: who he was talking to about fathers. His eyes flicked up to Tony, who was, yeah, almost kind of glaring back at him, so he quickly said, "I shouldn't-"

"What was the last thing?" Tony asked in a voice uncharacteristically free from nonchalance. He didn't find anything funny about this. Nothing worth a sarcastic remark. Nothing to breeze over flippantly. His father's murderer was stupid and insensitive enough to try to talk about his own dad. How else should Tony react but with venom?

Bucky felt small and stupid and wanted to apologize over and over about it because he could still remember Howard Stark's dazed eyes and the exact tone in which he'd muttered _Sergeant Barnes?_ and how at the time he felt nothing nothing nothing. The Starks were targets, nothing else. How had he been so inhuman as to not care that he'd murdered a man who used to call him an ally? "Nothing," he said, unable to maintain eye contact with Tony.

"What?" Tony demanded and Bucky had no idea why. But the word hit him sharply even if Tony hadn't said it with such a tone so he answered.

"The last thing he told me was that he was disappointed in me. Before he died." His eyes were on the space between Tony's head and his left shoulder, where he could keep the other man's facial expressions in view without having to face whatever was in his eyes directly. Because he was a coward like that.

He didn't know how long they stood like that with a silence so tense it felt like it'd pop any minute. And when it finally did, it wasn't the way Bucky expected, not by a long shot. No punches were thrown. Nobody shouted or cursed. Tony just laughed. Not a dark kind of laughter, or even sarcastic, but still not quite humorous either. It was sort of like something had clicked into place for him, or like he'd been missing something obvious until now. Bucky would be lying if he said he didn't flinch a little when Tony walked by and patted him on the shoulder on his way out of the room, Tony Bark bounding stupidly after him. What was he supposed to make of that response? Tony had mentioned once before having a difficult relationship with his dad but Bucky found it impossible to believe that anyone could be _disappointed_ with him. He was a genius, the head of an industrial empire, and a superhero to boot. How could anyone find fault with those things?

But then he thought of what little he could remember of Howard. The narcissism was the main thing, something so bad it was almost charming in its own way. Tony had come by that trait honestly. Natasha told him it was a classic response to never feeling up to par-if you told yourself and everyone around you how great you were, it had to be true right? But Bucky had a hard time understanding that. He looked at himself-some kind of freakish monster stitched together out of scraps of a person and the leftover parts of a killing machine-and he saw something someone could dislike, or even hate. He looked at Tony and he saw someone important and who always tried to do the right thing, even if he didn't always do it cleanly. Who could dislike him for that? How could Tony ever think of himself as not quite good enough?

"Sergeant Barnes, Captain Rogers is asking for you. Shall I tell him where you are?" Friday asked.

"Uh, no." If he let Steve come to Tony's work space, he'd have to explain why he was here. Steve was probably just concerned that Bucky wasn't in his room. He never slept with his door closed-privacy was a still a privilege in his mind and he was trying to get better about unlearning that-so it would've been easy enough for anyone to notice he wasn't there. "I'll go to him. Where is he?"

"In the kitchen, sir."

"Right, thanks, ma'am." He took one last look around the lab, full of stuff he couldn't really wrap his head around. Tony Stark was a genius, after all. And maybe Tony didn't feel like that was enough to make him a good person, or that maybe that trait was the only thing anyone cared about. Bucky looked down at his hands, the left functioning just as well as before, and he thought about all the time and effort people here had spent on him, on welcoming him, helping him adjust to a reality outside of HYDRA, on making him feel like he mattered and had real worth outside of what functions he could perform for someone else. With all that in mind, he thought maybe it was time he figured out how to do the same for the others who needed it, even if they'd never said it out loud.

He called Quiet to his heels with the click of his tongue and they left the lab.


End file.
